REPRODUCIBLE
Unwrapping the Standards: A Priceless Professional Development Opportunity
5.4
By Thomas W. Many Adapted from Texas Elementary Principals & Supervisors Association’s TEPSA News, November/ December 2020, Vol. 77, No. 6, www.tepsa.org
©2022 by Solution Tree Press. All rights reserved.
“Unwrapping the standards will provide [educators] with a first step to better focus instruction on the concepts and skills students need for success.” —Larry Ainsworth At its core, responding to PLC critical question one is about creating a faculty commitment that all students will master the most essential learning outcomes. To operationalize the answer to question one, teams must engage in a three-step process of prioritizing the standards to identify the most essential learning outcomes; unwrapping, unpacking, or deconstructing the standards to pinpoint the highest-leverage learning targets; and translating and rewriting the learning targets into I can statements using student-friendly language. Whether educators call them power standards, priority standards, or promise standards, these statements represent what is absolutely essential all students know and be able to do. They represent a subset of the larger list of standards and help educators distinguish between those standards that students need to know from those nice to know. One of the benefits of local, state, or national standards is that they promote the development of a guaranteed and viable curriculum by reducing the amount of variability from one teacher to the next regarding what students are expected to know and be able to do. However, many standards are written in complex ways using confusing language that is open to interpretation. When individual teachers interpret standards differently and emphasize different aspects of the standards during instruction, it is virtually impossible to guarantee all students will have access to the same rigorous curriculum. Interpreting the standards differently defeats the purpose of answering critical question one, which is to create clear, consistent, and coherent commitments among the faculty around what all students must know and be able to do. The only way to mitigate the potential for variance in the process is to unwrap the standards as a team and identify the highest-leverage learning targets within each standard. “There is the added challenge of really understanding what the standard means. It’s one thing to read a standard and get a general sense of what it’s about. It’s another thing to thoroughly understand what it explicitly and implicitly indicates.” —Larry Ainsworth The need for clarity, or collective clarity, and the precision it creates necessitates all team members share a common understanding of the meaning of each standard. When teams are clear on the meaning of the standard, there is no ambiguity around what students must learn. Thus, the purpose of unwrapping the priority standards is threefold: (1) to clearly identify what knowledge, skills, and dispositions all students must know and be able to do, (2) to ensure teachers clearly understand the level of cognitive demand (rigor) and the learning tasks the standard expresses explicitly or implicitly, and (3) to support identification of prerequisite skills, academic vocabulary, instructional practices, and assessment strategies, as well as any opportunities for intervention and extension. page 1 of 3
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